It's been awhile since I have written one of these blogs but there has been so much going on that I forgot about these for awhile. Here is my recap of what has happened:
A few weeks ago I got to experience the German holiday Karneval. The best way I can describe it is a mix of Halloween and Mardi Gras but instead of only being celebrated for one day, the celebrating is spread out over an entire week (the actual season lasts for a few months and the Germans sometimes even refer to it as the 5th season). Everyone dresses up in costumes and attends numerous parades to celebrate before Lenten season begins. The first big day of celebrating is Weiberfastnacht or the day of the women. On this day women walk around with scissors and cut off men's ties and kiss them on the cheek. On this morning all of AIB went to our first of many a Karneval parades.
For the remaining days of Karneval I attended several more parades including a smaller one in one of Bonn's suburbs and the huge parade in Cologne on Rosenmontag (Rose Monday) that lasts for 4 hours traveling through the entire city with over 1.5 million spectators. I ended the long weekend with way to much candy and flowers that I collected at the parades.
The week after Karneval ended our Biosciences group travelled to Vienna, Austria for a week of touring and learning (often even at the same time). We began the week with a walking tour of the city followed by another tour of the catacombs and roof of St. Stephan's Cathedral. The first day ended with some absolutely 'lecker' (German for delicious) Wienerschnitzel. On Tuesday we began the day with a medical history walk through Vienna with Dr. Schnabel (shown in picture below) followed a tour of the Josephinum, a museum of medical history with many very old but very accurate wax models of organs and parts of the human body.
Wednesday we began the day with a visit to the Spanish horse riding school where we watched some of their morning practices. The rest of the day consisted of a lecture on homeopathy, a short visit to the natural history museum and attending a classical concert that night.
On Thursday we began the day with the tour of the Narrenturm, an old insane asylum turned into a museum with countless wax models of diseases as well as old, preserved bones and organs, and later visited the Red Cross Headquarters for Austria. On the final day we had a lecture from Dr. Wasser on Sigmund Freud followed by a tour of his house and office. Overall it was an incredible, busy week of sightseeing and touring and my only regret is that I didn't learn that there was a cat café in Vienna until 3 days after we returned.
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